News of the week

Reserve Bank of India Looking Into Creating a Digital Currency

India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI), has confirmed the establishment of a group, which will focus on theusefulness of creating a rupee-backed central bank digital currency. RBI notes that the producing fiat paper/metallic money gets expensive and that led them to investigate fiat digital currencies and their risks.

The Federal Financial Monitoring Service’s (Rosfinmonitoring) new system will focus on Bitcoin at the start. Rosfinmonitoring already uses a Unified Information System, which will be upgraded by Moscow Institute of Security and Information Analysis (SPI) by the end of 2018. Russia strongly believes that cryptocurrency is actively used “in the trade in drugs, weapons, counterfeit documents and other criminal activities”.

Trading between Bitcoin and the Venezuelan Bolivar (VES) has beaten all records to pass 500 million last week. P2P platform Localbitcoins processed 506.3 million VES, in Bitcoin terms at 1143 BTC. However, The Venezuelan government is still under great criticism for creating this project, which is tied to its national cryptocurrency Petro. Some analysts are describing VES as a “scam on top of another scam”.

Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), one of the world’s largest exchange holding companies, is planning to launch Ethereum (ETH) futures by the end of 2018. Reportedly, it will be based on Gemini’s market, and now the futures and options exchange is waiting on the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to give the project the permission to launch.

The bill that will establish a working group on blockchain technology has passed both houses of the state legislature and will now be in hands of the state’s governor. The bill would define blockchain as “a mathematically secured, chronological, and decentralized ledger or database”. The group will consist of technology and non-technology industries’ specialists, and representatives of privacy and consumer organizations.

Economic and financial affairs ministers from the European Union’s 28 member states will hold an informal meeting and discuss a general lack of transparency and the potential for cryptocurrency to be used for tax evasion, terrorist financing and money laundering at a September 7 meeting in Vienna, Austria.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development states that the event will be held in Paris on September 4-5. It will be the first major international event of its kind, dedicated to blockchain technology. More than 400 “senior decision makers” are visiting the forum. Top blockchain company’ executives will also participate in the event.